A Short Survey on Routing Protocols in Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

A Mobile Ad-hoc Network (MANET) is a self configuring network composed of mobile nodes without any fixed infrastructure. A very important and necessary issue for mobile ad-hoc networks is to find the route between source and destination that is a major technical challenge due to the dynamic topology of the network. Routing protocols for MANETs could be differing depending on the application and network architecture.  There are various routing protocols that have been proposed for MANETs, it is quiet difficult to cover all of the protocols. In this survey paper, we present typical routing protocols based on unicast, multicast and geocast, which reflects the state of-the-art of research work on mobile ad-hoc network routing. Another criteria for classifying the routing protocols for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks, i.e. proactive, reactive and hybrid approaches have been later used in every of the unicast routing protocol and multicast routing protocol classification. This paper also provides an overview of the routing protocols by presenting their characteristics, functionality, benefits and limitations.